There are 23 minutes remaining before her Today show appearance, and Zlata Filipovic, the 13-year-old chronicler of war-torn Sarajevo, is snacking on cantaloupe, perusing a Harper’s Bazaar and affecting an impressive calm. Impressive because she is surrounded by more chain-smoking attendants than even the Texan rock-star aspirant seated across the green room. While there is no faux blond manager in black crochet at the young Bosnian girl’s disposal, her entourage is a solicitous group that includes her lawyer father and chemist mother, their Serbo-Croatian translator, a publicist and a representative from Zlata’s French publisher, whose apparent purpose is to help make the Filipovics’ stay more enjoyable by suggesting they go see The Phantom of the Opera or — less likely — Schindler’s List.
Zlata’s Today show interview is the first stop on her five-city U.S. tour to promote Zlata’s Diary, an account of her family’s life in the besieged Bosnian capital. The book has become an international best seller since its initial publication last fall, and when Zlata sits down with Katie Couric, it is immediately clear she has become adept at answering painful questions about her tragically abbreviated girlhood.
By 7:25 a.m. the interview is over, the heaviness of memory lifts, and / Zlata’s inner teenager slowly begins to emerge. As writer and company stroll up Fifth Avenue, Zlata, fixated on supermodels, eyes a new book by fashion photographer Arthur Elgort in a store window. Christy Turlington, her favorite supermodel of all, graces the cover. When there is talk of lunching at the Royalton hotel — which houses New York’s famously soigne publishing-world eatery, 44 — Zlata asks, beaming, “Is that where the models are?” But her giddy, girlish mood is dampened when the French publishing liaison, assuming a Naomi Wolf-ish posture, informs Zlata that “models aren’t people to emulate. They are obsessed with their bodies, not with what’s up here,” she adds, pointing to her head.
There is no feminist lecture at the group’s next stop, Bloomingdale’s, where Zlata ogles shoes. A self-proclaimed footwear fanatic, she admires some oxfords and high-tops but purchases nothing; her heart is set on a pair of $19.99 Mary Janes she spotted earlier at the Gap.
The shopping segment of the morning ends when Zlata’s publicist announces that it is time to head for a taping of Charlie Rose’s pbs talk show. Here again, Zlata holds her own, even when the usually unctuous host prods his child guest to defend herself against a New York Times review excoriating her book. Even when Rose asks Zlata, who is still struggling with English, if writing the diary was a “catharsis” for her. Returning to the green room, Zlata is delighted when Rose’s next guest, novelist Paul Theroux, tells her she guessed the meaning of the term correctly. The young writer sweetly offers the older author an autographed copy of her book. And she doesn’t even know the meaning of the verb network.
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